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Ask HN: Why does 'View Source' issue a new HTTP request?

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Re: Ask HN: Why does 'View Source' issue a new HTTP request?

#31

Post by LostCharacter »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #21

I wish View Source were more flexible. I would like: * Raw: a view of the actual body as sent in the response. Although I'm not aware of the current situation, at least some browsers used to subtly alter what was sent, even for View Source (possibly related to validity corrections). I want a guarantee that what I'm viewing is what the server sent. * View source as it is today (with a good common understanding of what…

To prevent a new browser request and to get a formatted version of the raw source in Chrome, you can open up the dev tools, go to sources, find the name of the page, and then click the curly brackets in the bottom left corner of the tools. It's still missing a good cursor implementation, though.

Re: Ask HN: Why does 'View Source' issue a new HTTP request?

#32

Post by amelius »

morley wrote: post #27
chx wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much memory is saved here? http://www.httparchive.org/interesting.php?a=All&l=Dec%202%2... 52 _kilobytes_ ? Really?

The browser would have to save the source text for EVERY tab it opens, regardless of whether you view source or not. That seems more onerous than making a separate request for the source code every once in a while.

Yes, but if you have more than enough memory, then that's no problem.

So, the browser should load the HTML page into a part of memory that can be discarded by the OS if the OS needs more memory. Actually I think it is strange that no such memory API exists in Unix.

EDIT: Anyway, storing it in the browser's file cache would also do the trick, I suppose :)

Re: Ask HN: Why does 'View Source' issue a new HTTP request?

#33

Post by monk_e_boy »

burnbabyburn wrote: post #30
spookylukey wrote: post #7

It's a bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=307089 Or, it's a memory saving feature. To implement "View source from cache" requires keeping around the raw page HTML, which you might not otherwise need after parsing - except you probably will for all the developer tools to work, so this probably should just be considered bug.

Couldn't you reconstruct the source from the internal dom representation anyway?

No. The parser corrects and changes the source to make the DOM.

So it is impossible to find errors usually. So things like:
the parser will correct, and therefore the DOM will be correct. But what it does to fix this may break your site. I often found the CSS would be screwed up for many reasons (rules don't match DOM structure -- due to bugs all over our codebase)

Re: Ask HN: Why does 'View Source' issue a new HTTP request?

#34

Post by czep »

Once the DOM is ready, the browser has no need to keep the original source in memory or cache. For how many page views does the user want to view source? One in a thousand? You're asking the browser to waste space storing something that it will only rarely be asked to display.

Re: Ask HN: Why does 'View Source' issue a new HTTP request?

#35

Post by supergreg »

spookylukey wrote: post #7

It's a bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=307089 Or, it's a memory saving feature. To implement "View source from cache" requires keeping around the raw page HTML, which you might not otherwise need after parsing - except you probably will for all the developer tools to work, so this probably should just be considered bug.

I wouldn't mind having to activate it in the developer tools and disable when I don't need it anymore and can feel the difference. Definitely easier than having to open a separate program like fiddler.

Re: Ask HN: Why does 'View Source' issue a new HTTP request?

#36

Post by Insanity »

amelius wrote: post #32
morley wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The browser would have to save the source text for EVERY tab it opens, regardless of whether you view source or not. That seems more onerous than making a separate request for the source code every once in a while.

Yes, but if you have more than enough memory, then that's no problem. So, the browser should load the HTML page into a part of memory that can be discarded by the OS if the OS needs more memory. Actually I think it is strange that no such memory API exists in Unix. EDIT: Anyway, storing it in the browser's file cache would also do the trick, I suppose :)

Isn't that one of the issues nowadays, that people have the attitude "we have enough memory" and thus don't tend to care about optimizing for memory usage anymore.

Your suggested solution, about discarding when memory is needed, solves this problem. But it solves a problem that would be created by needlessly storing a lot more data than needed. So it's a solution to a problem that was not a problem to begin with.

But I know, if it's a few kb, it will not make a huge difference.

Re: Ask HN: Why does 'View Source' issue a new HTTP request?

#37

Post by INTPenis »

junke wrote: post #15

I seem to recall that it wasn't always the case.

True and I was shocked that the referenced mozilla bug[1] is from 2006. Time really flies because it feels like yesterday I could view source without re-loading it.

[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=307089

Re: Ask HN: Why does 'View Source' issue a new HTTP request?

#38

Post by nommm-nommm »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #21

I wish View Source were more flexible. I would like: * Raw: a view of the actual body as sent in the response. Although I'm not aware of the current situation, at least some browsers used to subtly alter what was sent, even for View Source (possibly related to validity corrections). I want a guarantee that what I'm viewing is what the server sent. * View source as it is today (with a good common understanding of what…

Dev tools in most browsers does the first as does Fiddler as mentioned in a sibling comment.

Re: Ask HN: Why does 'View Source' issue a new HTTP request?

#40

Post by bpicolo »

spookylukey wrote: post #7

It's a bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=307089 Or, it's a memory saving feature. To implement "View source from cache" requires keeping around the raw page HTML, which you might not otherwise need after parsing - except you probably will for all the developer tools to work, so this probably should just be considered bug.

With devtools closed seems not worthwhile then. Vast majority of users aren't using devtools
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